Jon Snodgrass w/ Cory Branan

Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 8pm

Jon Snodgrass is quite possibly the hardest working guy in music. When he’s not working with his group Drag the River, one of the best things going in alt country, he’s lugging his acoustic from club to club, stopping only to visit a studio to lay down some tracks, before heading back out on the road again.

So it should come as a shock to absolutely no one that he has a new record out. The More Buddies, More Fun EP, originally released as one half of a full-length in Europe, is a collection of songs Snodgrass recorded with buddies Frank Turner, Ben Nichols, Rick Steff and Jim Ward (get it?). It’s finally getting a proper U.S. release thanks to Paper + Plastick Records. A proud new father, Snodgrass rarely gets out to the East Coast, preferring gigs closer to his Fort Collins, Colorado home.

Cory Branan is a natural-born storyteller. As with any of his musical and literary pedestal sitters, from John Prine and Leonard Cohen to Gabriel GarcÍa MÁrquez, and his well crafted songs has garnered him comparisons to Ryan Adams and Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst.

MUTT—Branan’s Bloodshot debut—also bears the marks of his “American gumbo” heritage: a winding path from nascent guitar shredder in the small, state-line town of Southaven, Mississippi, to fledgling troubadour in Memphis’ lauded underground music scene, and now a Nashville-based itinerant road warrior thrilling Thunderdomes as varied as Warp’s Country Throwdown and Chuck Ragan’s Revival Tour. While his music tips its hat to road-map influences from Motown to Mellencamp, the Delta bluesmen to folk pickers of ‘60s Greenwich Village, the united result is a singular sound spurred on by years spent on tour honing something rare that is altogether its own.